Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (review)

This in-depth investigation of cultural production and consumption during a single decade in nineteenth-century Britain starts in black and white and ends in full color. Nicholas Daly's new book marks a return to territory similar to that covered in his excellent Literature, Technology, and Modernity (2004), but seen from a different direction and with a focus on what might be termed the first fully "modern" decade. The book launches monochromatically with an investigation of the cultural meanings of black and white (phantom white women materialize and dematerialize in various ways and are juxtaposed to representations of the black slave or the newly fashionable gorilla in the same period) bursting into a full-colour explosion in the final chapter, which celebrates the layering of eye-achingly bright-colored ink in the chromolithography of Alfred Concanen and other illustrators of popular songsheets. As one might expect, Daly's favorite melodramatist, Dion Boucicault, makes multiple appearances, as does Wilkie Collins's now canonical sensation novel, The Woman in White (1860), and George Du Maurier's Trilby (1894) (which gets in by dint of being about the 1860s if not of them). But we also ricochet between blackface minstrel songs and James McNeill Whistler's controversial canvas, Symphony in White No. 1: The White Girl (1862). The book moves swiftly to and fro between low and high culture in a literal performance of its own argument which, as Daly tells us, is "that aestheticism and sensation are formed in the same cultural matrix" (83). The outlines of this argument emerge through the accretion of diverse elements in the book: Daly is interested in attention and distraction, and in the ways in which both aestheticist writing and sensational popular forms depend on what he at one point terms the "dyad of riveted attention and distraction" (10). Both Whistler's challenging and proto-aestheticist painting of a woman (his Irish mistress, Jo Hiffernan) in a white cotton dress standing against white draperies and the famous near-drowning scene in Boucicault's sell-out melodrama at the New Adelphi Theatre in London, The Colleen Bawn (1860) are attention-engineering insofar as they create special effects that work to detain the otherwise distracted attention of their spectators. In this he follows Jonathan Crary's arguments in Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (2000) but with a suggestive focus on "the new phenomenon of sensation" emerging in the 1860s (4). "The whiteness of the woman in white," Daly explains, "is at once the blankness of modern distracted consciousness and the representation of the dazzling (if temporary) cure for that distraction in sensation and spectacle" (51).

Despite their marked bifurcation by the end of the century, aestheticism and populism are, Daly suggests, much more closely connected than we generally think; both unfolded from the same seed in this decade. The 1860s witnessed accelerated cultural consumption alongside the so-called "leap in the dark" that was the Second Reform Act and the tragedies of the American Civil War across the Atlantic (11). From 1850 onward, Britain saw rising wages, improving rates of literacy and semi-literacy, syndicated news stories, national distribution of newspapers, and new technologies for the printing of illustrations and images: surely this was enough to create a new kind of public sphere? Through its engagement with the ever more complex experience of the cultural consumer "moving between one form of commodified novelty to another" (63), this book is particularly suggestive in tracing origins for some of the cultural phenomena that become much more obvious later in the century.

Daly helpfully diagnoses "a new dynamic of distracted spectatorship" (51), or the need for sensation to become ever more powerful—even violent—if it was to make an impact on the saturated consciousness of the urban spectator. In a discussion of how "Pepper's Ghost" (a sensational 1862 show "all done with mirrors" at London's Polytechnic) both does and does not appear in...